How I Found My Brain Up My Back Passage

EXCAVATIONS UP MY BACK PASSAGE : SERIES II

The need to initiate a second series of “Excavations Up My Back Passage” has been brought about by the impending arrival of a new garage door. In order to install it, the garage needs clearing of a twenty year accumulation of rubbish – an extension of the accumulation that already fills the back passage running behind the bedrooms. So once again our intrepid blogger goes into domestic archaeological mode …. and his first find is something rather special.

Hidden within a cardboard box containing a set of unused Filofax Diary pages from 1998, I came across a white envelope containing five Polaroid photographs. They appeared to be a set of graphic photographs of an operation – in one of them a scalpel is clearly visible. I didn’t take me long to realise that I was, in fact, looking at my own brain. The photographs date from the Spring of 1998 when I underwent surgery to have my cochlear implant fitted – the device that miraculously allowed me to hear again! I now remember the surgeon giving me the photographs after the operation – both to illustrate what he had been able to do and to assure me that, indeed, I did actually have a brain. In the illustration above, the wire can be seen that takes the electronic signal from the receiver – that is bolted in there somewhere – to the hearing nerve fibres and onwards deep into my brain. It was a remarkable piece of surgery and a remarkable piece of bio-engineering. Twenty years later, the system is still in place and working just fine; and allowing me to hear the clicking of the computer keyboard as I type this post.

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I had to type a reply so that I could check and see if I could hear the keys clicking on my keyboard! I CAN! What an amazing thing to be able to take a look at your own brain. And to be able to restore your hearing. I lost hearing in one ear for awhile recently and it is slowly returning. I didn’t miss the water until the well ran by.

Yes it was the things I was surprised by on getting me hearing back that were strange. The day after the implant was switched on I took my car back to the garage because it was making a dreadful noise. It wasn’t of course, I had just forgotten what the sound of a normal car engine was like!